Privilege

How to spell privilege

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce privilege

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does privilege mean?

1. nounA special right, advantage, or immunity granted to a particular person or group.
2. verbTo grant a particular person or group a special right, advantage, or favour.

Privilege in a sentence

• noun

  Membership grants the privilege of early access to every sale.

• verb

  The new policy seems to privilege senior staff over recent hires.

• noun

  Voting is a hard-won privilege that many citizens still neglect.

• verb

  Editors should not privilege one viewpoint while burying the others.

Where does privilege come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes straight back to the Latin privilegium, which literally meant 'a law affecting one individual'. It was assembled from privus, meaning 'private' or 'belonging to a single person', and lex, the word for 'law' (seen in its stem legis). In ancient Rome a privilegium was a special statute aimed at one person, and that sense of a right granted to some but not all carried through into the modern meaning. English took the word in by the twelfth century, largely through Old French where it was spelled privilege, and church and legal writers used it constantly for exemptions and special rights. The buried lex root is exactly why the trap sits in the middle: the second vowel is an unstressed 'i' (privi-LEGE, from law), not the 'a' or 'e' that many writers wrongly insert. The same lex shows up in 'legal' and 'legislate', a useful reminder of the spelling.

How the word is built

• privi- (from privus: individual, private)
• leg (from lex, legis: law)
• -e